After huge revenue beat for Q2 earnings, Nvidia buys Hugging Face

Nvidia’s revenues were up 106% to $96.22 billion last quarter, while predicting a 70% increase in the next fiscal year, so agreeing to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion might seem like pocket change.

It is, however, one of Nvidia’s largest acquisitions, Reuters notes, after the buyout was first reported by The Information.

Hugging Face is the «face» of the open source AI movement and maintains a repository of almost all available models, making this a significant infrastructure investment. AI labs treat publishing their weights on it as their official release.

Nvidia is of course not new to Hugging Face or open source, having as good as bought the OSS AI lab Poolside earlier this week to build their own models. They also invested in a $235 million funding round for Hugging Face in 2023 that valued it at $4.5 billion, and tried to invest $500 million in 2025 at a $7 billion valuation, according to The Financial Times.

It appears that Nvidia is somewhat hedging their bets and is increasingly investing in open source, as the frontier AI labs are increasingly developing their own chips, Reuters writes. Nvidia remains a significant investor in closed source providers, though.

Read more: Reuters, The Information (paywalled), and Business Insider. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.